


i'm naming the voices in my head (tell me not to give in)

by cmajorchords



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Band Fic, Drinking, F/M, Music, Road Trips, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 16:20:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3816928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmajorchords/pseuds/cmajorchords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she started running she hadn't been exactly sure what she'd been looking for, but now she's here to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm naming the voices in my head (tell me not to give in)

**Author's Note:**

> so, um, this happened. it's not my best work, but i gave up on editing. so whatever.

Everything in her life so far has been one big, meticulously planned, structured mess, so it really doesn’t come as a surprise when her decision to leave is split-second and spur-of-the-moment and something that would be severely frowned upon in the morning light. 

Clarke doesn’t stop packing, though. 

It’s sad, how all the most important things of her eighteen years of miserable life can be fit neatly together in a single backpack. There are some essentials, like clean clothes and clean underwear. Her phone, the battery turned out just in case it could be tracked, and car keys. A book or two for the road, along with her beloved sketchbook. Some cash and her credit cards – it won’t be long before someone finds out and her mother cuts her off for good, but she’s hoping she’ll be able to get to an ATM before then and suck the accounts dry first. The world owes her that much, at least. 

She allows herself a bare half-second of hesitation before she grabs her guitar case and slings that over a shoulder, as well. 

Downstairs, everything is cold and quiet and dark. Her mother’s car is still missing from the driveway, so Clarke counts herself as safe for the time being. She stops in the kitchen, reaches into a cabinet and grabs a bottle of old single-malt Scotch for good measure, before letting herself out the front door. 

She’s seen these streets a million times, but somehow, it feels different, knowing it’s going to be awhile before she sees them again. 

She backs her car out of the driveway, plugs her phone into the auxiliary cable, and puts on her angriest, most shouty music. It’s the music she likes to listen to when her thoughts are too loud to be contained within her brain, and now, it’s the music she’s going to listen to while running away. It’s fitting, somewhat. 

It’s only when she’s safely on the highway doing ten miles over the speed limit and probably endangering her life as well as a lot of other people’s that she lets herself admit that this is what she’s doing, this is running away, this is her taking control of her life for once in far too long and not letting herself look back. 

 

It takes a startlingly long time for her to begin missing home. 

It starts when she starts having to scrimp and save on motel money and gas money and food money despite the thousands of dollars she’d managed to lift off before her mother caught on to her game and starts leaving angry voicemails and text messages that slowly progress into the territory of quietly disappointed and I-didn’t-raise-you-like-this and then drifting into the realm of vague, resentful threats, before finally tapering off into nothing at all. It ends with her sitting on top of a bed at a motel in the middle of nowhere, probably staining her pants with unspeakable bodily fluids, forcing herself to rethink her priorities and this impromptu road trip from hell. 

It ends for real when she remembers what it had been like to constantly live under somebody else’s directions and instructions and never being able to breathe, never being able to look at someone the wrong way or drink until she’s black-out drunk or take midnight joyrides on abandoned roads, and decides that this road trip from hell is infinitely better. 

Of course, it doesn’t change the fact that she’s running dangerously low on funds, she’s somewhere in the middle of a Californian desert with no prospects whatsoever, and she needs to either get a job or go back home to beg for forgiveness for her irresponsible, reckless ways. Since option two has long gone out the window, she contemplates waitressing for the briefest moment before her eyes flicker to her guitar, innocuously leaning up against the wall next to the door.  

She could. She really, really could. She’d prefer it to serving backwash soda and undone steak to middle-class citizens in backstreet diners. She’d prefer it to anything else on Earth, actually.

 

“Clarke, you need to get over this childish rebellious phase immediately. There is no excuse for you to just leave with no warning, no note – do you know how worried I am? How worried everyone is? I don’t care if you think you’re discovering yourself, or – if you wanted to travel, you could’ve just told me, and I would’ve put together something for you, you don’t need to leave in the middle of the night. Do you –”

ONE MESSAGE DELETED.

 

It starts when she walks into a grimy dive bar in the middle of nowhere at four in the afternoon, her guitar on her shoulder, and asks for a job. 

The bartender raises a judgmental eyebrow at her. “We don’t usually do live music performances here,” he tells her gruffly, but there’s no underlying get-the-fuck-out in his voice, so she stands her ground. She hasn’t got much practice at it after a lifetime of being bullied around, but she likes it, and thinks it might come naturally.

“Well, you’ve got a stage, and a sound system,” she says, because this, this is what she does best, and she can already feel the adrenaline flooding her veins. “I’m not looking for much, here.”

“That much is obvious,” he mutters, but then jerks his head at the front of the bar, where the slightly elevated stage is. Like she’d said, it’s not much, but it’s a stage, and it’ll work. “I can’t pay you, though.”

She lifts her eyebrows, a clear disagreement. “Not even in drinks?”

He surveys her, hard and narrow. “Your drinks will be on the house all night.”

“And if I come back tomorrow?”

“If you come back tomorrow, and if I like what I hear tonight, then we can talk about pay,” he barters, and she nods, because at this point, she’ll take what she can get. She has enough money for one more night at the motel, anyway. If worse comes to worse, she can slum it in her car for a few more days. 

“What time do you want me to start?”

“Anytime you feel like it, princess,” he says, sweeping his arms out wide, as if to gesture at the severe lack of customers in the bar. 

“My name is Clarke,” she corrects him, and walks towards the stage to get herself set up. There’s an amp that she sticks her guitar into, and she plays a few chords idly, fidgeting with the settings and the levels until she’s pleased. Then she plugs in the microphone, sticks it onto the stand, adjusts it to her height as she sits with the guitar in her lap, settles in comfortable for the night. 

She knows more than a few songs on the thing. Her father had used it as a bonding thing of sorts, and this guitar is actually his – she’d stolen it from his room after the funeral, along with the watch he’d always promised to her, partly because she couldn’t stand the thought of her mother holding on to it after everything she’d done, and partly because she’d thrashed her own guitar, the one he’d bought for her, after she’d first gotten the news of the car crash, and was in severe need of a new one. 

With her left hand on the strings now, her right curved around the battered wooden body of the thing, it almost feels like he’s right next to her, sliding his own fingers over hers to teach her a new chord progression, how to fit her fingertips over the right strings. It feels like she’s still fourteen years old, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for the world and everything it had to offer. It feels like she’s still curled up beside him on the couch nearing midnight, watching old reruns of bloody television shows that are distinctly inappropriate for her age. It feels like he’s alive again, that he’s hers again, if only for so long, and she closes her eyes and inhales the stale cigarette smoke air to try and make it last. 

It doesn't. The warmth is gone as quickly as it had come, and when she opens her eyes once more, all she’s got is just another plain guitar in her hands – one that comes with too many memories to count, yes, but just another plain guitar. 

She strums her thumb lightly over the strings once, letting the soft chord reverberate through the air. The bartender is looking at her, drying a stack of beer pints with a dirty towel. She attempts a smile, and doesn’t think it works. 

“Any requests?” she asks, and with the microphone, her voice is loud, and foreign, and strange. Almost like with this strange new freedom, performing in empty dive bars, comes an entirely new personality. 

The guy only shrugs at her. He’s in his late forties, salt and pepper dusting his temples already. She wonders what he’s done in his life, if he’s got any interesting stories to tell, what had happened that had led to a life here, perpetually listening to other people’s sob stories and pouring drinks for the undeserved. “Something old,” he calls back at her. 

So she plays Eric Clapton. He’s one of the first few artists her father had played for her first, and after she’d fallen in love, had taught her the same songs. She remembers the melodies in her head starkly, all too clearly, and her fingers clearly agree, finding their way nimbly to all the correct chords in all the correct rhythms through ingrained muscle memory. 

When she glances up, thirsty after the third song, a bottle of water has made its way to the side of her microphone stand, and the few patrons of the bar – all middle-aged, but welcoming enough – are looking up at her expectantly, holding beers in their hands. 

A slow smile curves over her face. She readjusts the guitar on her lap. “Requests?” she calls out again, and this time, the bartender returns the smile. 

 

“My name’s Murphy,” the bartender tells her, pouring her a shot of vodka at the end of the night. She thinks back to the thousand-dollar bottle of whiskey still tucked away safely in her backpack, and tosses back the shot with abandon anyway. 

She gags a little, and then coughs violently. “What’s this, Murphy, paint thinner?”

“Would you like more?” 

“Give me the entire bottle.”

Murphy does as told, with no little amount of amusement. For all his gruffness, he seems to be warming up to her, or maybe just to her voice – she’d just sung for the entire night, after all, and the bar had filled up towards the end of it, so there were no ends to the requests. 

“You trying to burn away your stomach lining?”

“Maybe just my brain,” Clarke shrugs, and pours herself another shot. This one goes down a little smoother as she adjusts to the taste, and as her thoughts begin to cloud over, she decides paint thinner isn’t a bad way to go, after all. 

“Well, don’t do it here. My wife would kill me if I left her a dead body to clean up.”

Clarke raises her refilled shot glass in a mock salute. “You’ve got a sense of humor, Murphy, I’ll give you that.”

“And you sing nice,” Murphy tells her. “Want to talk about tomorrow night?”

“Are you going to pay me in a real money if I come back?”

“I’m thinking about it. You in need of real money?”

“I was going to get an actual job, but then I thought, you know, there are a lot of shitty bars in this world in need of music,” Clarke confides, and decides she might be getting drunk already. She frowns at the bottle. She’s not even halfway through yet. She needs to get herself more of this stuff, because she’s not a lightweight, but she’s already more than gone. 

Murphy laughs. “Tell you what. If you come back tomorrow, there’s going to be actual money waiting for you, and I think Harper wants to introduce herself.”

Clarke tilts her head to the side. “Harper?”

“My wife,” Murphy explains, and gestures behind her with one hand that isn’t occupied with wiping down the bar countertop. 

Clarke turns around and scans the half-emptied bar. It’s three in the morning and Murphy’s already preparing to close up and call people cabs home, so she doesn’t have to look far to find the one lone woman near the back of the room, wiping down the table. As though sensing the eyes on her, she glances up, spots Clarke, and lifts a hand in a vague greeting before dropping it back down again. 

“She’s pretty,” Clarke tells Murphy, turning back to him. 

His eyes soften in that way her mother’s used to when she’d looked at her father. She recognizes that look, and the soft ache in her chest makes her look away. “Yeah, she was a real looker back in high school. Still is, really, although all she complains about is how she’s getting fat now.”

Clarke shakes her head, as if it would rid the demons inside of her as well. “High school sweethearts, then?”

“Something like that,” Murphy agrees easily, looking back down at the counter he’s scrubbing. Clarke turns her attention back to the vodka bottle in front of her, raises it up to pour herself another shot, before pausing in midair. 

It’s been a while since she’d let herself get drunk in public – or rather, since her mother and her stupidly high expectations coupled with societal conventions had let her get drunk. Still, though, it doesn’t feel right, with her father’s guitar next to her and miles of open road in front of her. Maybe a few weeks ago, back in her mother’s house in that suffocatingly small town it had been the only way to temporary freedom, something she’d indulged in a few too many times than is really healthy. But here, when there is promise of a life and a future that is entirely hers? There is more than one way to escape, she tells herself, and pushes the vodka bottle back towards Murphy. 

He looks up in surprise. “Changed your mind?”

“Changed my mind,” Clarke agrees, and pushes herself off the bar stool, grabbing her guitar. “I’ll be back tomorrow, alright?”

“Counting on it, princess.”

 

Since Murphy hadn’t specified a time, Clarke turns up at the door at around the same time she’d come in yesterday. She’d taken care to take a shower at the motel beforehand, had fed a few quarters into a machine at the local laundromat she’d come across while getting lunch earlier, so she has on a set of clean clothes and her hair isn’t greasy and matted. 

“Clarke?” Harper asks when she walks in. She’s manning the bar today, her husband nowhere to be seen. 

“Murphy said me to come back tonight,” Clarke says uncertainly. “I –”

“I know, he told me. I’m Harper, by the way.”

“I know, he told me,” Clarke parrots, only half-unintentionally, and Harper smiles. 

“You’ve got a nice voice, Clarke. But let’s not dwell too much on that country crap from yesterday, shall we?”

Clarke surprises herself by laughing. “I’ll try, but I’m not making any promises with the kind of people you get in here.”

Harper rolls her eyes and gestures at the stage; Clarke takes her cue and boosts herself up on it, and finds the amp and microphone already running and ready for her, another bottle of water at her feet. 

 

“Clarke, you need to come home right now. The bank just called me, and there is no reason for you to need so much money. If money was what you wanted, I have money. You don’t need to – to steal from me. I know that you and I have had our disagreements, but –”

ONE MESSAGE DELEETED.

 

In the end, Harper gets her wish after all. Tonight’s crowd is decidedly different from yesterday’s, which had consisted mostly of the older set, the kind that had grown up without Internet and disapproved of everything pertaining to MTV and rock. She sees people more her age mixed in, clutching shots and bad pints, messing around with the snooker table and darts corner. 

She sees a dark-haired boy, tall, his curly hair all over the place and his henley sweat-stained and half undone, sitting at the bar. He does not take his eyes off her the entire night, throughout her entire set, not even after she takes a bathroom break, not even when he takes sporadic sips of the beer in his hand that has got to have gone warm by now. 

This is the reason why she completely expects it when she pulls the microphone away from her face for the night, begins winding up the amp cord after setting her guitar down, and he snakes his way in through the crowd right up to the stage. 

“What’s your name?” he demands, rude and standoffish. 

“What’s yours?” she snarks right back at him, because she makes it a point not make things easy for assholes who get up in peoples’ faces and command people around expect things to go their way just because they’re sort of hot and kind of terrifying with that glint in his eyes. She’s got practice with this kind of thing, you know. 

He looks a little taken aback at her tone. “Bellamy,” he says belatedly, and then blinks a bit. “Blake,” he tacks on, as if wondering if she’s waiting for it. 

She’s not. “It’s great to meet you, Bellamy Blake, but I’m about dead on my feet right now, so if you wouldn’t mind, I would like you to stop staring at me like you’re trying to drill a hole in my forehead so I can go back and get some sleep.”

He doesn’t move back to let her off the stage. If anything, he draws himself up, blocking her way. “You’re not making much money here. I want you to join my band.”

She looks at him. This is the look that she’s learned from her mother, the one that tells people to fuck off with a single glance, the one that tells people to stay the hell away and keep their idiotic crying babies at the farthest possible distance and to get her that drink, right now, pronto. It terrifies people. She knows, because it terrifies her, even to this day, never mind that she’d never admit it. 

He doesn’t budge. 

She has to say, she’s impressed, but she’s also exhausted, and he’s being a dickhead about everything. “If your band’s making better money than I am here, then why are you recruiting?”

He winces a little. “My band needs another guitarist. It’s – it’s not exactly off its feet, yet.”

She continues staring at him. “You want me to join a fledging band that’s probably living off instant ramen and stale Doritos and sheer force of will?”

“Well –” For a moment, he almost looks like he’s going to give in and let her walk away, but then he shakes his head and pins her with the most intense eyes she’s ever seen. “Look, okay, princess, you’re good. You’re very good, and I want you to continue being good with us. There’s not much I can offer you, but you’re standing on a stage in the seediest bar I’ve been to in a long time, and trust me, I’ve been in some seedy places, so you’re hardly one to talk.”

Clarke observes him for a very, very long moment. His gaze doesn’t waver in the slightest, and his resolve is what does her in at the end. Finally, she sighs, and shifts the guitar on her shoulder. “Okay, fine, let’s go meet this band of yours. Let me off the stage, will you?”

Pleased, he steps back. When she’s hopped off, he begins moving her through the crowd, towards one of the more secluded booths near the back, and a thought strikes her suddenly. 

“Why did you call me princess?”

He barely looks back at her, so intent on keeping his drink from spilling as he maneuvers through the haphazard sprawl of chairs and tables. “You looked the type.”

“The type?”

“You know. Blonde, type-A, anal-retentive, OCD, superiority complex.”

“You’re really not warming me up to this idea of joining your band, you know. Not when I’m going to have to put up with you for extended periods of time.”

He throws a careless smirk over his shoulder at her. This is the smirk that tells her he’s very used to getting his way, whether it be sex or free drinks or getting a stupidly gullible small-town girl to join a band. 

“You haven’t heard me play yet, princess.”

“You’re an ass.”

“You’re not very creative.”

He finally stops in front of a table, the occupants of which immediately glance up at her in half-forced disinterest. There are two guys, both short and not very impressive-looking but friendly enough all the same, and a girl who’s all tight braided hair and a tighter smile, pretty in her angles and sharp points.

“Princess, this is Jasper and Monty. Monty does bass and very good moonshine, Jasper does drums and even better weed. Say hi and play nice, boys.”

“We should be telling that to you,” one of the boys, Monty of the moonshine, says, and grins up at her, startlingly sunshine and cheeriness. She’d been expecting mini-Bellamy’s, all surly sarcasm and underappreciated snark. “How come this girl already looks like she hates you within five minutes of meeting, Bellamy?”

She finds herself smiling back, even as Bellamy huffs, annoyed. “Not my problem she’s got a stick up her ass. It must be my natural charm.”

“Your natural charm put a stick up my ass?” Clarke asks dryly. Jasper makes a slight choking noise into his drink. Instead of waiting for a reply, she turns to the last unintroduced member of the group. “Who’s this?”

“Oh, I’m just the groupie,” the girl says, her smile all shark-toothed and inviting. She holds out a hand to Clarke. “Octavia.”

“Groupie?” Clarke asks, even as she takes the hand. The girl has an unexpectedly firm grip, as well as a wreath of dark tattoos that wind around her wrist like stacked bracelets. 

“She’s my little sister,” Bellamy says gruffly. 

Clarke raises her eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything. The silence extends. Jasper and Monty look like they want to cut in, but something in Octavia’s face keeps them quiet. Bellamy shifts a little uncomfortably beside her, still standing. “Look, princess –”

“My name is Clarke,” Clarke interrupts. “And if you want me in the band, you’ve got to at least buy me a drink first.”

Monty and Jasper’s face brighten in such tandem that it’s at least a little bit funny. It’s easy to imagine that these two boys have grown up together, maybe in the same house, maybe not, but definitely like brothers. She wonders how Octavia and Bellamy factor into that equation, if all four of them are childhood friends. 

She thinks about Wells, and the sunlight kitchen they’d spent their afternoons, every afternoon, together. She thinks about her mother, and the letter that had been emailed to her just a few days ago asking for a decision on her place at college. 

But then Bellamy asks, “What do you drink?” and she pushes it all away again, into the little compartment she’d labeled with her past and then shoved firmly into a corner. 

“They do a vodka that’s actually mislabeled paint thinner,” Clarke tells him. “Ask Murphy about it, he’ll know.”

Bellamy sets down his own drink and moves back through the crowd to get hers. Octavia observes her with a growing smile, moving over on her side of the booth so Clarke can sit down. 

“You know,” she says conversationally as Clarke does exactly that, “I think we might be friends.”

 

When Monty finds out she’s been holing up at a motel for the past almost-week, he wastes no time in inviting her to move in with their little pseudo-family and then turning the biggest, most effective puppy eyes in the world on Bellamy when he immediately starts making noises of protests. 

Bellamy lasts all of five seconds, to his credit, before sighing and scrubbing a hand over his face. Octavia smirks and drapes an arm over her brother’s shoulder. “You’re practically advertising for strays, Bell. Where on earth do you even find them?”

“I’m not here to take charity,” Clarke begins, even if moving out of the motel seems like a really, really nice offer. She’s kind of tired of being kept up at night by banging headboards and screams, and she hasn’t slept properly for days.

Octavia pins her with a sharp glance. “This isn’t charity,” she says, her voice razor-sharp. 

“We take care of our own,” Jasper pipes up. “And besides, it’ll be easier, anyway. Also cheaper.”

“Something tells me money is one thing the princess doesn’t have to worry about,” Bellamy drawls, his voice lazy but something resentful in his voice anyway. He sees more than he lets on, she’ll give him that. Apparently her upbringing is evident in more than just clothes and makeup, and she half-wants to ask what had given her away, rich little girl slumming it, so she can destroy it.

She doesn’t think she’s a rich little girl slumming it, though. This is her life now, even though it’s only been a scant few weeks, and she’ll be content with it. It’s better than the five-course French meals and champagne benefit parties that had once constituted a home, anyway. 

“I’m actually running low on funds,” Clarke says, keeping her voice even. This isn’t a lie, anyway; she can’t afford to stay at the motel much longer, and she’d been looking forward to a night of being camped out in the car before looking for cheaper accommodations. “So if I could take you up on that offer, it would be cool.”

“Then it’s settled,” Octavia decides. “She can room with me.”

“Technically, she’d be rooming with everyone,” Bellamy intercedes, his voice dry. He turns regard Clarke. “We live in a trailer. There’s a kitchen no one knows how to use, a tiny living area, and two rooms that are mostly occupied by beds. One bathroom, with very suspicious plumbing.”

“It’s like you’re trying to make your offer as unattractive as possible or something,” Clarke snarks right back at him. 

Bellamy smiles wide at her, all teeth and insincerity. “It’s like you can read my mind already.”

Octavia snorts at them both. “You two are made for each other,” she declares, before climbing right over her brother’s lap and kneeing Clarke in the back to get out of the booth and score another round of paint-thinning vodka. 

 

The trailer is actually kind of big, as far as trailers go, but small, as far as living spaces go. It’s not like she’d been expecting much, though, and she’s actually surprised when Octavia opens one of the doors in the back to reveal a messy bed and it’s actually softer than she’d been anticipating. 

“You need anything?” Octavia asks impatiently, hovering. 

She shrugs. “I’ve got a blanket, and I’ve got clothes. I’m going to take a shower.”

“Great. Bathroom’s just down the hall, it’s not possible to miss.” Octavia hesitates. “Look, I know you just got here and all and my brother’s being a giant dick, but the thing is, we need food money. We’re almost out, and –”

Clarke reaches into her backpack and emerges with a fistful of twenties. It’s half her remaining funds, but they’re doing her a favor letting her bunk with them, after all. “Go to the grocery store,” she tells Octavia, whose eyebrows have significantly risen at the sight of all the money. “Don’t get takeout, or pizza, or junk food. Stock up on the non-perishables, get things that are filling and can come cheap like noodles or rice.”

Octavia takes the money from her carefully. “Thanks,” she says, her voice measured and controlled. She looks up at her. “Bellamy wasn’t wrong about you, was he?”

“Wrong about what?” Clarke asks, purposefully oblivious. 

“You come from money.” There’s no judgment in her voice, or even resentment; she sounds merely matter-of-fact. “Don’t you?”

“Not anymore,” Clarke says with finality, and turns away to get her toiletries out. 

 

“This isn’t what your father would’ve wanted for you, Clarke. You’re – you’re a runaway, do you know that? You’re a statistic. I know you can be more than that. You had a wonderful life, Clarke, and I provided that life for you. Are you just going to be ungrateful and turn you back on me like this? Do you know how embarrassing this is for me? Do you know what people are saying about you? How am I supposed to –”

ONE MESSAGE DELETED. 

 

It’s four in the morning, but they eat sitting in a circle on the ground in the main area of the trailer anyway, parked off the side of a deserted road that is exactly where Clarke had been envisioning to dump the body when she was planning to murder her mother. Octavia had listened to Clarke, and had gotten cans of food and soup they reheat in the dodgy microwave of the trailer kitchen. They pass them around, digging straight in with forks Monty had scavenged from around the place. 

Bellamy gets out his guitar halfway through, a battered thing that looks like it’s seen more bad days than good; Clarke raises an eyebrow but Jasper immediately brightens and flips one of the empty cans upside down, rapping the wrong end of his fork against the metal bottom experimentally. 

“Right now? We’re doing this right now?” Octavia asks exasperatedly, but she boosts herself up to sit on the sink counter anyway to give them space. 

“You should know what you’re getting into before you get in too deep, princess,” Bellamy tells Clarke, strumming a hand along his strings. “Feel free to join in, if you can keep up.”

Clarke takes this as a personal challenge and dusts her hands off, reaching behind her to unzip her own guitar from its case and perch it on her lap. She turns back around, locks eyes with Bellamy, and then they start playing. 

It sounds practiced, but Clarke can tell by the way Jasper’s brow is furrowed in intense concentration and the way Bellamy’s hands half-slide over the chords that they’re still looking for a compromise on the rhythm, that he’s still singing the chord progressions in his head a moment before he plays them aloud. It starts off familiar, a melody she’d heard once or twice off the radio, and then Bellamy drops a minor key and moves the entire thing a off-center, spinning his own ideas into the tune. Jasper settles into an upbeat, lively rhythm that finally smooths out his brow, and a few bars in, Octavia starts humming in the background, weaving something new into the foreign, even before Clarke’s gotten her own grip on the thing. 

Bellamy doesn’t even have to look at his sister before he joins in half a bar later, weaving the same melody with his voice in a minor key to his sister’s major, letting her lead but following so confidently Clarke could’ve sworn they were singing together. Monty looks at them both thoughtfully for a moment, before he scrambles for a piece of paper and a pen to jot something down hastily.

And then Bellamy throws the most smug, most condescending look her way and her fingers are too still on the guitar. She’s confident she can pick up fast, and when she sets her hands on the strings she finds it comes easy, too easy, and when Bellamy picks up the pace, making Jasper scramble on his empty soup can, it’s an obvious challenge. 

So she sings instead, abandoning chords to pick out Octavia’s first, easy melody on the strings, unwavering notes piling and spilling and echoing together throughout the tiny trailer. She picks out fragments of lyrics she half-remembers and others that she makes up on the spot, and it probably makes no sense whatsoever but she’s on key and it sounds good, so whatever. She throws in a new line or two to keep things interesting, to keep Bellamy frowning and scrambling on his own guitar to follow her melodies, but stays back on the established notes so everyone else can keep up. 

She could go on like this forever, except after a while Octavia stops singing abruptly and Bellamy sets down his own guitar half a second later, like they’d planned it all along. Jasper attempts a half-riff on the go and drops his soup can instead. He frowns down at his lap, as though personally offended by his hands.

Clarke’s fingers still on her guitar as well, but she doesn’t move, keeping her eyes on Bellamy’s expectantly. The sudden silence is slightly jarring. 

“You’re good,” Bellamy tells grudgingly, after a moment, and Clarke’s so surprised that she almost misses Octavia’s half-smile, behind her brother.  “Better than what you sounded like onstage. You sound better impromptu.”

Clarke laughs a little. “So you want me to make things up on stage instead?”

Bellamy shakes his head. “I want you to listen to the songs we’ve already recorded, and I want you to play it yourself for us, your own way,” he instructs quietly. “Monty?”

Monty turns around, drops the piece of paper he’d been scribbling away on into Bellamy’s lap, and then grabs a backpack off the ground to dig around in it depths. 

“Did you write the song down?” Clarke asks curiously, wondering what Monty had been doing.

“Some of it,” Monty shrugs, still looking through the backpack as Bellamy’s eyes flicker over the page. “I also wrote a bass line. Just, you know, because.” A moment later, he straightens as he emerges with an old iPod, and drops that into Bellamy’s lap, also. 

“Monty writes most of our songs,” Octavia explains absently, from where she’s kicking her heels against the cabinet beneath their kitchen sink. “He’s our little musical genius.”

Monty flushes bright red as Jasper reaches over and messes up his hair. Bellamy holds out the battered old iPod to her. “Some of our recordings have been uploaded in here,” he says. “Give it a listen, and then I want to hear it from your guitar.”

“Right away?” Clarke asks, frowning even as she takes the iPod. 

Bellamy smirks. “You play better live and unplanned. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”

“I’ve never played for anyone before,” she says vaguely, and ignores Monty’s too-knowing stare as she slips the earbuds in and presses play. 

Bellamy’s voice immediately fills her ears, low and sultry and this side of husky, unable to miss and unable to forget. It penetrates her very consciousness and she closes her eyes to hear it better, letting it sink into her skin, breathing it in like cigarette fumes. He may have a gift with the guitar, but she knows what his true calling is, and it’s not playing backup for someone else’s show. He belongs on center stage, his voice knows it, and she’s pretty sure he knows it as well. The music thrums a steady beat to complement the rises and falls of his singing, low and staccato one moment, rising high with the tide and a swelling crescendo in the very next line. Listening to the music and his voice work in tandem with each other, picking up where the other leaves off and leading where they know they’ll be followed is like watching a movie unfold on the silver screen, watching something brilliant and alive come together to shine. 

She opens her eyes after the first song trails off into the dark, his voice ending on a note of low promise, and takes the earbuds out. 

Bellamy raises his eyebrows at her, the first face she sees, demanding and impatient. 

 “Okay,” she shrugs, and revisits the scene in her head again for half a beat before she begins playing. 

Bellamy’s register is too low for her, so she shifts the entire song into a new key, making it brighter on the high notes and a little more bruised on the lower ones. She threads in a new guitar line in the established playoff between the melody and the existing music, complementing both and bringing out fresh new tones. She’s not a prodigy; she can’t learn a new song just by hearing it, but she’s good at making stuff up on the fly, so when she stumbles and forgets, her fingers stuttering on the strings, she leads it someplace new, copying the sound of his lyrics but making it entirely her own. 

When she finishes and looks back up, Bellamy’s expression is carefully blank. Monty and Jasper are beaming identically at her, though, and she can even see mild approval on Octavia’s face. 

“That was so cool,” Jasper breathes at her, excited and contagiously happy. “You took our song, and you – you turned it into a new one! A cool one!”

“That sounded really good,” Monty agrees. 

“You have a talent,” Octavia says mildly, and leans forward so she can poke her brother in the back with a foot. “I told you we needed her. Aren’t you glad you went up and bribed her here?”

Bellamy draws himself up, frowning. “I didn’t bribe her, she came of her own volition –”

“You bought her a drink and gave her a place to stay,” Octavia smirks back at him, crossing her arms. “If that’s not a bribe, then pigs don’t fly.”

“They don’t,” Bellamy counters pointedly, but Octavia only rolls her eyes. “But I’ll give you this, princess, you’re pretty good.”

She shrugs again. She’s never been good with compliments, if only because so few have been thrown her way her whole life, but taking credit for someone else’s work has always felt weird. And playing guitar – it’s never been entirely hers. 

“Who taught you?” Monty asks curiously, leaning forward towards her. 

“My father,” Clarke says shortly, and busies herself putting her guitar away again. Monty seems to get the message, leaning back against the side of the trailer, but Jasper’s forehead creases in confusion. 

“Your dad? But Bellamy said you looked like a runaway –” There’s a muffled yell as though Jasper’s just been kicked, and when Clarke turns back around, she sees Jasper massaging his shin and glaring at Monty. 

“But you are running away,” Bellamy picks up, his eyes suddenly too intense on her. 

Clarke thinks about it, holding his gaze steadily. “I suppose you could look at it like that,” she says finally, and then Monty takes a bottle of something clear and dangerous-looking out from his backpack, pressing it into her hand. 

“Have a drink,” Monty offers. “You’ll feel better.”

“Not in the morning, though,” Octavia mutters. “Don’t give her liver poisoning when she hasn’t even played a proper set with us yet, Monty.”

“Think of it as initiation,” Jasper suggests brightly. 

“What is it?” Clarke asks dubiously, examining the contents of the bottle. 

“Moonshine,” Monty declares proudly. “I distill it myself and everything, in the bathroom.”

“The bathroom,” Clarke repeats, even more skeptically now. “And you’re saying it’s going to give me liver poisoning?”

“It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever had, and I’ve gone a lot of places,” Octavia confides. 

“Don’t drink too much on your first go, princess,” Bellamy warns her quietly, as she fits the lip of the bottle to her mouth and tips it back. 

It burns a raging, burning trail down the back of her throat, and she emerges gagging and coughing, glaring at everyone as they laugh at her. 

“We warned you,” Octavia says, but she’s eyeing Clarke speculatively. “You do kind of look like you need it, though.”

“I do,” Clarke agrees, and takes another swig before her common sense can kick in. 

This one goes down smoother, easier, and a lot sweeter. 

 

“You are childish, and immature, and you need to come home. Right now. Do you hear me, Clarke? This has gone on long enough –”

ONE MESSAGE DELETED.

 

“We’re booked tonight,” Octavia announces as she strides into their shared bedroom at what appears to be the crack of dawn, her hair up in a sweaty ponytail, her workout clothes clinging to her skin. 

Clarke tries to fight her way out of the cocoon of blankets she’s managed to tangle herself up in, finds her tongue cottony and dry and her head pounding, and decides to give up while she’s ahead. “What?” she mumbles into the comforter, confused and disorientated and completely hungover. 

“Tonight,” Octavia repeats, and huffs a little when Clarke gives no response, still trying to process her way through the current situation. She yanks unceremoniously at the comforter, and Clarke yelps a little as it falls away from around her and she tumbles onto the bare mattress, sunlight streaming into her eyes. 

“Fuck,” Clarke mutters, and buries her head into the mattress instead. 

“Get up, drink a glass of water, have some aspirin, and take a shower,” Octavia tells her matter-of-factly. “We’re getting waffles for breakfast, because we’re getting paid tonight.”

It occurs to Clarke that Octavia is a self-declared groupie, but she acts like she’s a part of the band as well. It’s far too early to ask her about it, though, and she manages to convey her thoughts about getting up in a very fervent groan. “What time’s it?”

“Seven,” Octavia declares brightly. “I’ve already been up for two hours, and I’ve been exercising. How productive have you been today, Clarke?”

“I think I have the hangover from hell,” Clarke confides, even as she rolls over onto the floor. She’ll think about picking herself up off it later, when it feels less like sledgehammers are breaking new ground in her head. 

“That’s Monty for you. Come on, stand up, you want the shower before the boys get up.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, and then I’ve got to take a shower too because I stink, so get the fuck up, okay?”

Clarke groans some more but then Octavia heaves her up by the arms and steers her towards the shower. “Go,” she orders, and Clarke sighs but does as told, trying her best to ignore the building headache. 

When she gets out of a shower, miraculously feeling a lot less like a zombie, Octavia hands her a waiting glass of water and two pills, watches until she’s swallowed all of it, and then strides into the bathroom to shower herself. When she gets back out, Clarke is feeling considerably better, and she can hear noises coming from behind the boys’ bedroom door that tells her they’re in the process of waking up as well, probably from the noisy plumbing. 

“So we’re getting paid tonight?” Clarke asks, following Octavia to the boys’ door. 

Octavia knocks politely three times, and then not so politely so more when no one immediately responds. “We’ve had this gig for a while now. It’s nothing fancy, but money is money, and hopefully it’ll bring in more.” She raises her voice. “BELLAMY?”

There are a string of very detailed expletives, ending with a request for the time. 

“It’s time for waffles,” Octavia replies without missing a beat, and raps on the door some more. “Are you lot decent? I’m coming in!”

There’s the sound of a fairly mad scramble around the sheets, but Octavia isn’t deterred in the least, slapping the lock several times until it gives way without too much of a fight, and then she bangs the door open noisily. 

Jasper and Monty are still half-sprawled together on top of the mattress, grumbling quietly about the noise. Bellamy is in the process of pulling on pants, and he turns to face his sister, glaring irritably, as he does up his fly. 

“What,” he growls, flat and annoyed. 

Octavia barely blinks, apparently used to this. “We’re getting waffles to celebrate pre-emptively, and also because waffles. We’re leaving in an hour, so if you guys want to shower, you should get a move on.”

“It’s too early for waffles,” Monty tells his pillow. 

“On the contrary, it’s really not. And I’m hungry, so hurry up.”

 

An hour later, they’re all mostly dressed, and Bellamy is maneuvering the trailer onto the main roads in search of a waffle house. Monty and Jasper are taking turns brushing their teeth and spitting out the window, and Octavia is curled up on the couch playing a game on her phone. 

“How did you guys form the band in the first place?” Clarke asks out of the blue, although she’s really been thinking about this since Bellamy had invited her to their booth yesterday night. 

“We grew up in the same neighborhood where everyone knew each other,” Monty informs her helpfully when it seems like no one else is about to reply. He gargles one more time from a suspicious-looking bottle of water, spits out the window, rolls it back up, and sinks down to sit beside Octavia. “Went to the same school and everything. When Bellamy suggested it, it just seemed natural.”

Clarke frowns. “How did you guys get from a small-town band to touring the dirt streets of America? You all can’t be that much older than me.”

Octavia points at Bellamy in the driver’s seat up front without looking up from the screen. “He’s the oldest. Twenty-three. The rest of us are seventeen, going on eighteen.”

Clarke raises her eyebrows in his direction and purposely raises her voice just a tad. “So he’s the old man of the group, then?” she asks cheerfully.

“I will not hesitate to crash this trailer so you die a bloody, fiery death, princess,” Bellamy calls back, equally cheerfully. 

“Your threats don’t actually work anymore,” Octavia informs him. “We all kind of got that after the fifty-third time you threatened Jasper with emasculation for accidentally using your shower gel.”

“His shower gel?” Clarke asks incredulously, unable to help herself. 

“He gets weirdly anal about weirder things,” Jasper mutters, finishing brushing his own teeth and closing his own window. He goes to sit on the floor next to Clarke, humming a little under his minty fresh breath. 

“And how old are you?” Monty interjects quietly, looking at Clarke. 

“Eighteen. Just,” Clarke replies. 

“When was your birthday?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” Clarke says vaguely. 

Octavia’s gaze sharpens abruptly. “When you ran?”

“If I wanted to go, being underage wouldn’t have stopped me,” she says. “I was only waiting for the right time.”

Octavia leans back, knowing. “The last straw, huh?”

“Something like that.”

Octavia goes back to her game. Monty picks up a book off the floor, flips it open to somewhere in the middle, and uses Octavia as a pillow to lie back against as he reads; somehow, Clarke gets the feeling that the book’s not actually his, and he hadn’t started reading at his pace. Jasper rummages around the kitchen until he emerges with a packet of dried fruit, which he munches on absently as he looks out the window. 

It isn’t until they pull up in front of a waffle house that Clarke realizes they’d never actually answered her question, about how they’d gotten from point A to a crappy trailer doing crappy gigs and eating crappy food and making excellently horrible moonshine in the bathroom, which would probably permanently stink of alcohol. Instead, they’d completely redirected the conversation on her, and she still knows next to nothing about them but somehow they know that she’s a runaway, that her father taught her the guitar, that she comes from money. 

“Smooth,” she mutters in an undertone as she piles out of the trailer with the rest of them. 

Octavia tilts her head towards her. “What was that?”

Clarke shakes her head. They’ve taken her in, and they might be virtual strangers still, but she can wait on her curiosity. “It’s nothing.”

They order waffles, and a surplus of coffee. It’s the perfect hangover cure, and by the time Clarke leans back in her seat, full to bursting, she’s feeling a lot better about this day already. 

“If we’re going to play with Clarke tonight, we should probably practice some,” Bellamy says, after everyone’s done eating. “Do you want to sing, or just play?”

Clarke shrugs. “Whatever works.”

“I want to hear how her voice sounds with yours,” Octavia says suddenly, and Bellamy gives his sister a look, but nods. 

“Alright, fine. Then let’s go.”

 

Their gig is in a bar that is run-down and falling apart but somehow filled to the brim anyway. There’s a chalkboard propped up outside that advertises happy hour and live music performances, and Clarke frowns as she realizes she’s been missing one very important part of the puzzle all along. 

“Hey, what’s our band name?” she asks, watching Jasper and Monty and Bellamy unload Jasper’s drum set from the back of the trailer. 

“The 100,” Octavia tells her, and frowns. “Really? You’re only asking now?”

“it just occurred to me, when I saw the set list outside,” Clarke shrugs. “Why The 100?”

“Why not?” Octavia deflects, and Clarke can immediately tell there’s so much more to the story but lets it go anyway.

They’re the third group on stage, so they sit together at the bar first, downing just enough drinks but not too many, and watching the others get up before them. The first is a duo, one on guitar and another on one of those drum boxes. The guy on the guitar is tall, muscled, tattooed all over, and has a voice low and scratchy enough to send shivers up Clarke’s spine. His companion is taller, her hair braided back tightly, and glares at anyone she makes even a second of eye contact with. 

The second is a solo performer, a mediocre voice and an even more mediocre guitar, playing covers of mainstream, popular songs that can’t be botched up too badly but isn’t exactly attention-catching either. 

The crowd starts to murmur, impatient for the next, as the guy unplugs his guitar and makes his way off the stage; Clarke and Bellamy and Monty get their instruments set up first, and Clarke watches Octavia elbow her way to a prime spot right in front of the stage, a drink in hand, as Jasper puts the finishing touches on his drum set. 

They’d gone over the set list at practice earlier, out in the desert where they’d gotten each other familiar with their playing styles and decided how best to split up the parts and where they could add in more. Some of them are original songs written by Bellamy and Monty, others are covers, and the rest are a combination of both, mashed together into something new. 

Now, though, with Bellamy at stage center and Clarke off to his right, he looks out at the crowd and then at her, before shrugging. Before she can even frown, his fingers have moved, and he plunges them into a chord progression that definitely does not belong to the first song on the list she’d memorized. 

If this is his way of testing her, he’s about to get shown up. Impromptu, after all, is her best type of playing. After a life of being controlled, she can’t help but wonder if this is the entire universe’s joke on her. 

So she lets herself follow his lead for a count of eight, sixteen, thirty-two; and then she throws a triumphant look in his direction and a flirty one at the audience before launching into her own take on the song, golden where his had been silver, breathy where he’d been rough, light and laughing when he’d been serious and heavy, an altered mirror image. 

The audience response is as immediate as Bellamy’s, as he frowns as her and attempts to adjust his own playing to match her. They brighten, perk up, look away from the bottoms of their drinks and up towards them. 

Clarke grins, keeps playing, and waits for the perfect moment to drop a riff and give the lead back to Bellamy, wondering where he’d take it now.  

They duel with their voices for the rest of the song, looping back to try each other’s parts again, and once more to drive home their points because both of them are stubborn as fuck and suck at compromise. Finally, Jasper starts banging his cymbal and Clarke steps back, giving Bellamy the spotlight to close out the song. When the next starts, he lets her go first, and stays in the background, picking out careful melodies on his guitar an octave below the line she’s playing so it almost sounds like a heartbeat, beating to her voice steadily. 

They finish out the rest of the set like this, one of them stepping forward and the other stepping back, sometimes trading off, sometimes fighting for control. It’s better than performing alone, Clarke realizes. It’s different with someone up there with you, someone guaranteed to catch you if you faltered, to back you up when you’re shining. It’s different, having people around you to depend on. 

It also gives a far better adrenaline rush when they close out their set with a bang and a flourish and the audience explode into cheers, beaming at them like they’re the second coming of Jesus. 

“Haven’t seen anything like that in a while,” the bartender remarks to them as they slide into booths, sweaty and sore, and he comes over to drop off their first round of shots, on the house. “Y’all just keep doing what you’re doing, alright?”

Clarke watches Monty and Jasper throw back their shots at the exact same time and the smile playing on the edges of Octavia’s mouth as she communicates silently with her brother, squeezed into the booth next to Clarke. “I gotta go pee,” she shouts over the thumping bass of the next performers, and pokes at Bellamy’s shoulder until he slides over to let her out. 

The bathroom line is about a mile long, but Clarke walks right past it and out the door of the bar, out into the cooling night air. It’s already dark outside, and she sits on the curb watching the deserted street. Out here in the Nevada desert, the stars are just barely on this side of visible, and she leans back with her palms flat on the dusty street so she can tilt her head back and breathe in the sky. 

“That was cool, up there today.”

Clarke jerks her head around so fast she almost sprains her neck. Unperturbed by her surprise, Bellamy sinks down to sit beside her, his hands loose, sweat sticking the back of shirt to him and his dark curls to the nape of his neck and around his temples. 

Clarke eyes him suspiciously. “What are you doing here?”

“I followed you, princess. I wanted to talk to you. Thank God you didn’t actually go to the bathroom, because that would’ve been awkward.”

“About what?” Clarke presses, ignoring the rest of his words. 

“I told you we were looking for a guitarist. But after today, I was wondering if you’d like to sing with me,” Bellamy says, and for once, his face isn’t mocking and arrogant. His expression is completely open as he looks at her, honest and sincere. Not for the first time, Clarke wonders if the asshole act is just something he slips on in the morning to protect himself from the rest of the world, much like she’d once had to put on her skin of respectful, dutiful daughter for her mother every single morning. 

“I already sang with you,” she rebukes, in lieu of replying. 

A smile ghosts across his face. “I know. I was thinking of making it more a permanent state of being, rather than me being up there and wondering what I could throw at you before you cracked.”

“You’re an asshole,” Clarke says, lamely, because it’s not actually true and she’s said it too many times already. 

“Apparently it worked, because you’re a gold mine I intend to exploit.”

Clarke laughs, unable to help herself. “Like I said, it’s like you’re trying to make everything you offer as unattractive as possible or something.”

Bellamy shrugs. “So? How about it?”

“I’ll sing,” Clarke tells him. “I don’t mind it. I like it. And I think the audience likes it better when we sing together, you know.”

“Believe me, Octavia told me. She was the one who suggested I come out and ask you, you know.” Bellamy pauses. “I would’ve done it anyway, if you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.” Clarke tilts her head to look at him, and finds his face a little too close. She can count the freckles on his face, and she wonders what shape they’d make if she joined them all together. He meets her eyes steadily, unwaveringly, without flinching. 

Finally, he nods and stands, stretching out his arms. “Well, that’s decided, then. You going to come back in with me?”

Clarke looks back out at the open, empty roads. It looks like freedom, and it’s a little hard to believe that it’s hers, after so many years of chasing after what she’d thought to be a silly pipe dream. “Maybe after a while.”

“Suit yourself.” He turns to go, but then hesitates and turns back around towards her. “Whatever it is you’re running from, princess, I sincerely hope that it’s been worth it.”

He leaves. She looks back up at the sky, and refuses to think about exactly when princess had turned into less of an insult and more of an endearment. 

 

“I don’t know what game you think you’re playing here, Clarke, but I’m not going to play it with you. Once your money runs out, you’ll see. You’ll come running right back, and –”

ONE MESSAGED DELETED.

 

They get asked to come back the next night, and the next, and the next. At night, they perform. In the mornings, they usually celebrate with breakfast out, which they can afford now that funds aren’t so tight – Clarke hasn’t had to delve back into her siphoned money for grocery cash yet, with the money they’re making now. In the afternoons, they drive out into the desert and practice and write songs and practice some more, until Clarke’s fingers are sore and on the verge of bleeding, and it’s not until they realize they’ve skipped lunch and that Jasper is half-dead of exhaustion that Bellamy finally calls for them to stop, to go back inside and rest up to prepare for the night. 

It takes less effort than Clarke had anticipated for her to fully merge into the group, for them to integrate her into their music and that uncanny mind-reading she’s noticed they do sometimes, on stage, in a pinch, when Jasper knows exactly what song Bellamy’s about to segue into mid-chorus of another one, when Monty knows what notes to pick up when Bellamy leans back to take a breath. 

Maybe it’s because her voice and Bellamy’s merge together beautifully. Maybe because they’re all excellent at their instruments, and it doesn’t take much fiddling to get them to sing in harmony. Maybe because they’ve worked together and known each other for so long, so they know each other well enough to know how to slip another into the mix and not have that trip things up. Either way, it works, and Clarke realizes that she couldn’t have made a better decision, joining with them. 

More than anything, she’s made friends here. Friends she can count on. Friends she knows the little things about, like how they take their coffee in the morning, how much moonshine they can drink before collapsing on the nearest available horizontal surface, what flavor of waffles they prefer – not just what Ivy League they’d graduated from, or how much money they’re making a year. These are friends she likes, and she’s made a life for herself here. It surprises her, how much she wants to make this work, to make it last. 

They get a few weeks of driving around bars out in in the Nevada-Californian desert, doing gigs and making music. Then Octavia waves them urgently off the stage after one of their performances at a local dive, and when they come down they realize she’s sitting across from a tall, dark-haired woman, her hair scraped back into a severe ponytail and her eyes as sharp as her eyebrows and her black blazer. 

“This is Raven Reyes,” Octavia tells them, a light in her eyes. “She works at a recording company, and she wants us to go in for a session in the morning.”

“The 100,” Raven greets them, lasering in on Bellamy, and then Clarke, before turning to survey Monty and Jasper. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve been tracking the lot of you all over this ridiculous desert the past month, and I’m happy to report that it’s been worth it.”

Clarke holds herself shock-still. Next to her, Bellamy simply stares in stupefaction; she can hear Monty’s rough intake of breath behind them. 

“Um,” Jasper blurts intelligently. 

Raven smiles wide at them, shark-sharp and speculative. “Take a seat, order a round, and let’s talk, shall we?”

 

“This is your last chance, Clarke.”

ONE MESSAGE DELETED.

 

In the morning, they take turns in the cramped bathroom of the trailer, get dressed up in their fanciest clothes – which in this case, just means their cleanest, most recently laundered – and generally pretty themselves up for the studio Raven had slipped them directions to at the end of the night. They’d ordered a round, and then another, and had talked Raven through the formation of the band, their general style, and career aspirations at her behest. She’d nodded carefully and sipped at her single glass of rum and Coke, before seeming to make a decision. 

“Meet me here, at ten,” she’d said, handing them her card. Her name is outlined prominently in bold on the expensive white cardstock. “Don’t be late.”

Clarke leans back against the sink counter eating yogurt straight out of the container with a mostly clean spoon. She’s wearing a blouse and trousers and ankle boots, her hair scraped back, and she’s watching with no little amount of amusement the rest of the band scramble around the place yelling at each other over odd socks and hairstyles. 

“We’ve never done this before,” Octavia informs her, whizzing past her in a tank top and reaching beneath the couch to yank out a shirt that she smooths out and frowns at critically. “You know, the fancy-dressing thing. In case it wasn’t obvious.”

“It’s obvious,” Clarke assures her. “Mist the thing with water and stick a blow-dryer on it to make the wrinkles come out fast.”

“Thanks,” Octavia smiles gratefully, and darts into the bathroom to do exactly that. When she comes out wearing the shirt neatly buttoned up to her collar, she’s tugging at her hair wildly. “What am I going to do with all this?” she moans, and Clarke sighs. 

“Come over here,” Clarke instructs, and goes to shift piles of crap off the couch so she can sit down comfortably. “I’ll braid it for you.”

“Really?” Octavia asks, perking up. 

“Really,” Clark nods, and pats the cleared space beside her. 

Half an hour later, they’re all mostly presentable, and the yogurt container is empty. Clarke drops it into the sink behind her, and wipes off her hands as Bellamy settles himself into the driver’s seat. “Are we off, then?”

“Mm,” Bellamy nods absently, and starts the engine. His curls have been gelled back into order and he looks nothing like himself. Clarke doesn’t like it, but goes to join everyone else on the couch anyway. 

Raven Reyes’ studio is a two-story brick building that’s wider than it is tall, sprawling over the red dirt of the desert. It’s not exactly out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s also not in the heart of civilization – there’s a coffee place a few blocks down, a few residential streets, local schools and shopping malls, but that’s about it. Bellamy pulls up in front of it, frowns at the sign above the glass doors, and nods. “We’re here.”

“Are we ready?” Monty asks quietly.

“I’ve been ready ever since we left town,” Octavia declares, and is the first off the trailer. 

The reception is air-conditioned and outfitted in clean-cut marble, glass, and chrome. The single receptionist behind the desk, tapping away at her computer, has blonde hair up in a very functional bun, a black blazer over the back of her chair. She smiles when they file in, all feeling varying degrees of out-of-place, and stands up. “Ten o’clock, Ms Reyes?” she asks. 

Bellamy, at the front of their group, nods tersely. The receptionist steps out from behind her desk. Her nametag reads “Andrea”, and her smile reads welcomingly. “Right this way, please. Would you like refreshments? Tea, coffee, water?”

“Water,” Clarke interrupts before anyone else can say anything. She sends a cool, calm smile towards the receptionist. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” the receptionist nods, and presses the elevator button for them. “Second door on the right, room 204. She’ll be expecting you.”

“Why water?” Jasper asks, the moment the elevator doors close behind them. 

Clarke shrugs. “Tea and coffee show too much commitment. Water says vaguely interested, and it’s better if you keep her hanging on the first meeting.”

Bellamy raises his eyebrows at her as he presses the only other button on the panel for the second floor. “You’ve done this before.”

“I’ve been in meetings before,” Clarke says, and is eternally grateful when the doors choose to open right at that moment. 

The doors reveal a hallway filled with identical frosted glass doors, each labeled with a number above the top. There’s an electronic keypad beside each, but when Bellamy raises a fist to knock on their door, it swings open easily. 

“Morning,” Raven greets easily, sitting at the round conference table that occupies almost the entirety of the room. There are several takeaway cups of coffee in front of her, still in their little cardboard holders. “I took the liberty of getting coffee, but before anything else – I want to hear you play.”

“You heard us play yesterday,” Bellamy says, frowning. “I thought today would be about –”

“It is, and I did,” Raven agrees smoothly, but gestures behind her. For the first time, Clarke notices that the back wall of the room is made of two-way glass, and the room behind that is split into two – one for mixing, with boards and panels and lights and microphones, and the other for performing, filled with a veritable treasury of instruments. “I heard you yesterday, but the people coming in ten minutes haven’t, and they’re the people you’re going to have to convince before I can even think about signing you. So. I want you in there setting up, Wick should be along soon to mix levels for you, and then you’re going to go through all the songs you know the best way you know them. Alright?”

Bellamy looks behind them. Octavia raises one shoulder in a half-shrug, Monty and Jasper look excited already, but Clarke simply nods. “Alright,” he nods. “But you’re – you’re thinking about signing us?”

Raven looks at him, unimpressed. “Either you’re a lot thicker than I thought you were, or you’re just insecure. Get in there and play something brilliant, and we’ll see.”

Bellamy’s eyes narrow, but Clarke grabs him by the elbow and steers him through the door that leads into the mixing room, and then past that into the studio. “Am I singing?” she asks lightly, going directly for one of the guitars and picking it up to sling over her shoulder. 

“You should,” Octavia interjects before Bellamy can reply. She looks at her brother when she continues. “Everything sounds better when the two of you are singing together.”

“I can do that,” Bellamy nods, and the small smile he gives her even seems sincere. 

 

“I mean it, Clarke.”

ONE MESSAGE DELETED.

 

The contract is signed at the end of the day, because the people that needed impressing have been fully impressed to the best of their capabilities, the coffee has been drunk, and the calluses on Clarke’s fingertips are aching the way they hadn’t since she’d first picked up the guitar with her father, too many years ago. 

“I guess that’s it, then,” Octavia says as they walk back to their trailer, Raven waving them off from the entrance of the studio with the biggest grin on her face. “We’re signed. We’re legit. We’re an actual band now, putting out actual music in the actual world.”

“We were already an actual band making actual music, before,” Bellamy corrects dryly. “Getting our names on a piece of paper and a binding contract didn’t change that fact, O.”

“Yeah, but now we’re a band,” Octavia repeats, throwing her hands up as if to punctuate this point. She frowns a little. “Well, I’m not really.”

“You’re an integral part of our band and our music-making process and we’d be completely loss without your expert guidance,” Jasper pledges immediately.

Octavia grins and leans over to ruffle Jasper’s hair, as they pile onto the couch together and Bellamy climbs over the sink and into the driver’s seat. “Thanks, Jasper, you’re awesome.”

Jasper puffs himself up tall. 

“Where did Raven say our apartment was?” Clarke asks, settling down beside the fridge and twisting to yank open the door of it. As part of the contract, they’d also managed to score living quarters after they’d explained to Raven their current situation. She’d said it was something offered to most people they signed, anyway, and hadn’t even blinked an eye at the living-in-a-trailer thing. 

“Just off around the corner, I think,” Bellamy says distractedly, pulling the trailer onto the road. 

“Does this mean we have to live like normal people now?” Monty asks. 

“You mean, with a full-size fridge and a toilet that doesn’t empty out into a crap bucket?” Clarke says, pulling out a beer from the fridge and then slamming it shut. It slides an inch or two to the left, and Clarke rolls her eyes, twisting the cap off the beer. 

“It’s four in the afternoon, why are you drinking?” Octavia wants to know. 

“I’m celebrating. We’re celebrating. We’re legit now, you know,” Clarke says. “Also, I think I have a bottle of hundred-year-old whiskey in my backpack somewhere that I’ve been saving for a rainy day, so when we get to the apartment, that’s what we’re celebrating with.”

“And pizza?” Jasper asks hopefully. 

“And pizza,” Clarke confirms. 

“You have a hundred-year-old bottle of whiskey in your backpack for a rainy day?” Octavia demands incredulously. 

“Why am I not surprised, princess?” Bellamy calls over from the driver’s seat, deadpan, but before Clarke can think up of a suitably snarky retort, he slams the brakes on the trailer, jolting them forward. “I think we’re here.”

Octavia digs the envelope Raven had handed them out of her pocket. She opens it and turns it upside-down, and out falls five sets of keys, a couple of credit cards, and a folded-up handwritten note. She takes one of the keys and squints at the tag on it. “Fifth floor, 507. How many bedrooms did Raven say it had?”

“Three,” Bellamy tells her. “We’ll sort that out later. Let’s just get everything up there first, okay?”

Between the five of them, they manage to bundle up most of their worldly possessions, including their instruments, up the elevator and into the apartment. It takes only three trips to get everything, even Jasper’s drum set, and by the end of it the trailer is oddly empty and devoid of life. The apartment has already been fully furnished, bland and modern, and Octavia takes the liberty of checking out the bedrooms and the two bathrooms, while the rest of them flip coins to see who would share rooms with who.  

“Well,” Bellamy says, and drops the keys on the coffee table, placed on the carpeted living room with a television and a huge, sprawling couch on either side of it. “It could be worse.”

“We have an apartment,” Jasper marvels, and goes to hug a wall. 

“Yeah, but we have no food,” Octavia reports, emerging from the kitchen. “There’s a few bottles of water, but that’s it. No food. And I’m sick of takeaway, so someone needs to go to the grocery store and buy things and cook things.”

“How can one be sick of takeaway?” Clarke wonders. 

“Yeah, it’s like a food group,” Monty chimes in, collapsing on the couch. “I could use a fresh meal, though.”

Octavia gives them both irritable looks. “Takeaway is what I’ve survived on for almost a year now. We’re not eating takeaway.”

“Well, I can’t cook,” Clarke shrugs, and looks around at the rest of them, wondering what other kinds of hidden talents could be resurfacing. 

“I can cook,” Bellamy sighs. “Octavia, you want the curry thing, right?”

Octavia nods eagerly. “With the potatoes?”

“Fine,” Bellamy says, and looks around at them. “Clarke, you’re coming with me.”

“I’m – what?”

“To the grocery store, to buy ingredients. No one else knows how to buy anything but microwave meals and canned food.”

“How do you know I know how to buy fresh ingredients?” Clarke asks, never mind that she does, because even though she can’t cook, she’d grown up under her nanny’s tutelage and that included following her around the kitchen while she pointed out food and flavors and how to make it work in a pot on a stove. 

“You’re the princess,” Bellamy explains easily. “The rest of you, don’t break anything.”

Clarke trails after Bellamy back down in the elevator and into the trailer. She lets herself into the shotgun seat this time, because sitting back there is strange with no one else around, and nothing else around either. 

After a moment of slightly strained silence, Clarke clears her throat. “So,” she begins, wondering what to say.

“Your phone was ringing all through the meeting,” Bellamy says, his eyes firmly on the road. He doesn’t sound angry, but his voice is tight. “I know you’re running away from something, and I don’t want to know what. I just want to know that it isn’t going to mess anything up for us, because this has been too long coming, and it seems too good to be real, and Octavia –”

Something cold shoots straight into Clarke’s veins and freezes her solid. “It isn’t going to mess anything up for you,” she says, her voice sounding very faraway. She never should’ve put the battery back into her phone. She’d thought enough time had passed, but apparently her mother can be as stubborn as she is. 

“Look, Clarke, all I wanted is for my sister to be happy. And she’s happy now, and I’m happy, and if you can’t understand –”

“Bellamy, it isn’t going to mess things up.”

“Really? Because it looks to me like you’ve got some seriously unfinished business, and it’s going to come right back and bite you, and the rest of us, in the ass,” Bellamy snaps at her, and stops the trailer. Clarke glances outside and sees they’ve pulled up in front of the local supermarket, but he’s making no move to get out. 

“The business is finished, on my end if not on anyone else’s,” Clarke retorts, her eyes flashing. “As far as I’m concerned, this is the only life I’ve ever lead. Don’t worry your pretty head about it.”

“Princess –”

“My name is Clarke,” Clarke interrupts, exhausted. She rubs at her temples, willing the budding stress headache away. “And it seems to be like you’ve got unfinished business too, Bellamy Blake. I know what I’m running from, but what about you?”

Bellamy laughs hollowly, meanly. “Oh, princess, I know exactly what it is I’m afraid of,” he shoots at her, caustic and cutting, and slams his way out of the trailer.

 

“Clarke, if you don’t come back or call me back, this is it. Whatever it is you went away to do, you should be back by now. This isn’t what your father would’ve wanted –”

ONE MESSAGE DELETED.

 

It takes her the entirety of dinner and half a five-hour marathon of the latest Grey’s Anatomy episodes on their newly acquired cable television for Clarke to make up her mind, and then she finds herself outside Bellamy’s bedroom door while the rest of them sit outside on the couch making disgusted noises at the ongoing brain surgery onscreen. He’d gone inside right after dinner, citing a headache and exhaustion from driving around and performing all day, but Clarke gets the feeling he’s more bothered by their conversation than he’s letting on. 

She raises her hand to knock, hesitates, and then puts it back down. She nudges the door open quietly instead, and sees Bellamy lying on the bed through the crack, half-tangled up in the sheets. 

“What?” he mumbles softly, apparently not as asleep as she’d been expecting. 

She clears her throat a little. “It’s Clarke.”

He rolls over, and squints at her through half-lidded eyes. His curls are messed up again, and she realizes she prefers him infinitely more like this, half-undone and unforced. “What do you want, princess?” he demands, his voice infinitely colder. 

She slides inside, and closes the door behind her, pressing her palms flat against it.  “A peace offering.”

He struggles upright, kicking the blankets until they fall away from his legs. He’s still fully dressed; he must’ve fallen straight into bed. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Clarke takes a deep breath. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

He sits upright fully, leaning back against the headboard, assessing her with cool, dark eyes. Finally, he scoots over on the bed and pats the cleared space beside him. “Okay.”

“Okay,” she says, and goes to sit next to him, resting on the edge of the bed. She leans her head back, and looks up at the ceiling before closing her eyes, glad for the darkness of the room because it means he can’t see the expressions on her face. 

“But only if you tell me why first,” Bellamy says suddenly. 

Her eyes pop open, and she turns to frown at him. “What?”

“Why you want to share,” Bellamy clarifies. “Why now, when all you wanted was to pretend it never happened, before?”

Clarke looks at him a long moment, wondering just how he’d managed to hit upon the exact same question she’d been asking herself over and over for the past two hours a few seconds into the conversation. “Because I can’t pretend it never happened,” she finally shrugs. “Because it’s my life, and if you’re going to be in it, then I guess it’s your life too, and you deserve to know just like I deserve to know why you and your sister bunk with two others in a trailer driving around America aimlessly. Because I’m tired of hiding, and like you said, it’s just going to come back and bite all of us in the asses.”

Bellamy half-smiles at her, amused. “Okay. Feel free to begin, princess.”

“I ran away from home,” she says carefully, each word weighed and controlled, “because my mother thinks I’m someone I’m not, and I’ve been pretending for her benefit all of my life, and I thought if I did it for the rest of my life I was going to spend it locked away in a facility.”

“Octavia and I left because my father bailed and my mother started beating us up and after Octavia had to stay in the hospital for a month because of how badly her ribs had shattered, I decided we had go before she went in and couldn’t come out, and it was the only way I knew to protect her. Monty and Jasper, we picked up on the way looking for band members, after we went back home for our mother’s funeral two months later, when she killed herself.”

Clarke nods slowly. Everyone has demons, she thinks, it’s just that sometimes they live on the edges of your minds, and sometimes they live in your body, protected by the same ribcage that protects your heart. 

“Lie with me for a bit,” Bellamy says after a quiet while, and in the dim light he looks nothing like an older brother, a band leader, a lead singer. He looks young, and scared, and exhausted, and Clarke knows it takes infinitely more courage to leave with someone you love, rather than to leave by yourself. 

So she says nothing, but she swings her legs fully onto the bed so that their arms are pressed together side by side, and they sit together in the silence of their words. 

 

“Did you two sleep together?” Octavia demands the moment they shuffle out together from the room in the morning, blearily-eyed and half-asleep. 

“No,” Bellamy says without fanfare, and plops himself down at the kitchen table, making grabby hands at the filled coffee pot Octavia’s just removing from the coffeemaker. 

“Are you lying to me?” Octavia asks suspiciously, but removes two mugs from a shelf and fills them up with the coffee anyway. She slides one down in front of her brother, and another towards Clarke, who takes a seat beside Monty.

“No,” Clarke says, rolling her eyes, and sips at the coffee. It’s too hot to properly drink, and also a bit too bitter, but she’s too lazy to get up for creamer or milk and sugar, so she just blows on the top of it ineffectually. 

“If they did, they’d be protesting a lot more right now,” Jasper points out reasonably, reaching for a donut from the box in the middle of the table.

“Yeah, exactly,” Bellamy agrees, and reaches for a donut himself. “Who bought the donuts?”

“I went out for a run, and I found the cutest café in the world,” Octavia explains distractedly. “But you guys slept in the same room! We checked and everything!”

“Sleep, as in life-giving hibernation, not sex,” Clarke explains. “Bellamy, give me a donut.”

Bellamy obliges. Octavia watches this exchange with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “You two are getting along better. Are you sure there was no sleeping of the sex kind?”

“Positive,” Bellamy and Clarke confirm in unison. 

Octavia huffs a little and stalks from the kitchen, muttering about a shower. Jasper crunches into his donut, and Monty smiles, half-hidden by his coffee mug. 

“So what’s on the agenda for today?” Monty asks, directing his question at Bellamy. 

“We have a recording session,” Bellamy says, gulping down half his coffee in one go. “And then I guess … we’ve finally got a life to live.”

Clarke smiles. “I like the sound of that.”

 

“I just saw the news, Clarke, what on earth do you think you’re playing at? This  - this teenage phase, it’s gone on long enough. How long do you think you can live like that? You are going to leave that stupid band and come back right now, and –”

ONE MESSAGE DELETED.

 

They record, and then do publicity for Raven, and then make music, and then record some more. It becomes a routine that their lives fall back into – where once there had been dive bars and worrying about running out of shampoo and cheap shots after performances for people who don’t care, there is now an air-conditioned studio with a whole team of people whose job it is to make them sound good, and an apartment, and relative freedom from the material concerns in life. 

They’re not getting paid much, not yet, just for the bits and pieces they’ve managed to get on the Internet to get people buzzing and excited about their upcoming album, the gigs they get opening for other, bigger bands to raise their own publicity in the real world. Still, it’s better pay, and far steadier pay, than what they’d been living on before, and it’s a nice change. 

For Clarke, who’s never had much cause to worry about money before and is terrified of not knowing how, it comes as a welcome relief. 

And then their album comes out, and it’s quiet for a week or two, long enough for them to start getting worried. Then one morning Octavia comes screaming into the apartment after her daily run with Raven on the phone, and everything they’d once dreamed about is coming to life right in front of their eyes. 

With their singles on the charts and their album skyrocketing to the top, their lives get significantly busier. 

Clarke wonders how on earth famous people ever have time to get drunk or get hooked on drugs or prostitutes, because it feels like she hasn’t gotten a proper night’s sleep in three weeks, with all the interviews, the television appearances, the performances they’re pulling off in between regular trips to the studio. 

Jasper manages to put it in very succinct, accurate words: “Being a rock star is so tiring,” he announces one night after they get back from the studio, past midnight, all of them starving but wanting more to just to go sleep. 

Clarke nods and agrees and stumbles into the bedroom she shares with Octavia, fully intent on sleeping the day away – but when she falls into bed, drawing the covers up over her head, she finds herself suddenly wide awake, and her phone burning red-hot in her pocket. 

She stays perfectly still for a moment longer, keeping her eyes shut, hoping sleep will still overtake her. She can hear Octavia’s soft snores filling the room, as she mumbles in her sleep and rolls over, taking most of the blankets with her. 

Clarke sighs, gives it up as a lost cause, and rolls out of bed. She heads to the bathroom, where she flips on the light, closes the door, and sits herself down on the closed toilet seat while sliding her phone out of her pocket. She presses the button on the top to wake it up, and her screen shines with three new voicemails, no texts, no missed calls, which comes as a mild surprise. After all, she knows where she got her stubbornness from, and it’s not her mother. It seems strange that she’d give it up with just this, but Clarke hesitates only slightly, her finger hovering above the button to open the voicemails. 

They’re kicking off the impending summer with an American tour, with a few other bands Clarke’s always wanted to meet in person. It’s mostly their album tour, but since it’s their first, they’d also be doing an almost equal quantity of publicity as shows, something Raven has already taken the liberty of warning them of. After that, they’re off to Europe for God knows how long, and sometime in the middle of the last bits of the year, they’d have to start working on the beginnings of a second album. This is their life now. Her mother may not be much of a mother, but Clarke can’t help but feel like she deserves to know. 

Of course, she already knows some things. Her previous voicemails had informed Clarke of that much, at least. With all the attention The 100 has been getting, it’ll be hard not to notice her name in so much print. To be honest, Clarke hadn’t expected it to take so long for her mother to catch on. It feels almost like showing her up, because she’d run away with zero prospects and a decidedly not bottomless pit of money and connections, and now she’s actually made something of herself, something she loves, with people she’s starting to love. To her mother, she knows it would feel like nothing of that sort – musicians aren’t the kind of circles she runs in. To her, Clarke would be nothing short of an embarrassment. 

But maybe, if she called back, she’d be able to convince her mother to back off and leave her alone to live this life. 

Maybe. 

Probably not. 

Clarke taps the screen and holds the phone up to her ear to listen to the voicemails anyway. 

 

 

“Clarke, I’m not going to say I’m sorry, but I want you to listen to me, because –”

“I’m sorry, Clarke. I’m sorry, for everything. Please – please come home. Please.”

“Clarke, I – I’m begging you.”

 

“Clarke? It’s – too early for this. Why are you sitting in the bathtub?” 

Octavia stands outlined at the door of the bathroom, hair messy, no pants on. She looks half-asleep. She probably is. 

“My father died tomorrow,” Clarke says, something hollow in the pit of her stomach, and then she starts crying. 

 

Everyone tiptoes around her the next day as if fearing for the fate of the entire world. 

Clarke doesn’t think she’s that bad at acting. She’s not crying anymore. Her eyes aren’t even red. She goes about her business as usual, in the conference rooms meeting with creative directors, in the studio refining a few of their songs, doing photoshoots and then a long interview for a magazine in the early evening before being dismissed for the night. She hasn’t bailed on anything at all, despite the overwhelming desire she’s been fighting to just crawl back into bed and check out of life for the foreseeable future. 

She’s handling it. She hasn’t talked about it, and she doesn’t need to talk about, all she needs is ice cream and some sleep and for everyone to stop glancing at her every five seconds like they’re trying to make sure she’s not hysterical or something. 

She blames most of their behavior on Octavia, who had no idea what to do when confronted with her crying in the bathtub at four in the morning, and had immediately run to get her brother who, of course, had even less of an idea of what to do, and at the end of it everyone was gathered at the bathroom door with Monty trying to wheedle her out and coax her to stop crying with promises of food and coffee. 

It hadn’t worked, but she’d eventually managed to stop sniffling, wash her face with cold water, and then step outside. She’d gone to breakfast, and had managed to get through a somewhat normal day. 

“I’m not going to break, you know,” she says mildly in the middle of dinner, which is pizza on the couch accompanied with a The Walking Dead marathon. 

Octavia pauses, a slice of cheese pizza halfway to her mouth. “But –”

“I already broke. I cried. That’s it. That’s the entire show, folks, can we go back to the regular programming now?”

“Do you need to go home?” Bellamy wonders, his voice and expression for once empty of any malice or sarcasm. 

Clarke resists the urge to slam her head against his. “I already said I wasn’t going to break. I don’t need to go home. I have to be the furthest place away from home right now.”

“Where is home?” Monty asks casually. 

“New York,” Clarke says before her brain can catch up to her mouth, and then pauses. “Okay, look. If we’re going to do this, this spilling of tragic backstories thing, can we at least finish the pizza first?”

“No,” Jasper and Monty say simultaneously, which is always a bad thing, because when the boys put down food it’s either a nuclear apocalypse or they’re going to badger for something with the stubbornness of a thousand donkeys and won’t let up until they have what they want. 

Clarke sighs long-sufferingly. “Today’s my father’s death anniversary,” she tells them, matter-of-fact and halfway pleasant. “My mom called to ask me to go home.”

“And you won’t, because?” Octavia prompts, her arched eyebrows raised very judgmentally. 

“Because she killed my father,” Clarke shrugs. “She – pushed him. She pushed everyone, but him especially, because no matter what she did, no matter what he said, it was never good enough for her. And he worked late all the time, and didn’t get enough sleep, and one night he was driving back from the office at midnight and a car came out of nowhere and hit him, and she didn’t even – if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have been there. And maybe that’s irrational on my part, but I can’t live with her anymore.”

“So you left?”

“And here I am.”

“If it’s your father’s death anniversary, you should at least visit his grave,” Bellamy says quietly. “You respect him still, even if you don’t give a shit about your mother – although if she’s called you, it at least means she’s trying. If I knew who my father was, if my mother was still alive, I know I would’ve wanted to go back.”

“But not for too long,” Octavia adds. “You know, because we still need you in the band.”

Bellamy half-smiles at his sister, and leans over to ruffle her hair before shrugging at Clarke. “It’s your choice, but I have it on good authority that the van gets pretty good gas mileage.”

 

“I’m going to my father’s grave tomorrow, can I borrow the family van?”

Bellamy groans audibly and rolls over. His sheets twists around his legs and slip off his torso, and of course he has to be shirtless because the entire universe refuses to do anything but actively conspire against her. He squints at her in the darkness. “Princess. To what do I owe this pleasure, two nights in a row?”

“Budge over,” Clarke says without hesitation, already stepping towards his bed. He groans a bit more but rolls over anyway, allowing her to slip onto the bed with him. She stuffs her cold feet beneath his sheets, warmed by his body heat. “Okay, look, fine, you’re right. I need to go see my dad even if I’m fending off my mother the entire time I’m there, so like, I’m going. You have to tell Raven for me, and I need the keys to the van.”

“You’re really going to drive across the country?” Bellamy asks skeptically, sounding a little more awake now. He boosts himself up so he can smush his cheek into the pillow, looking up at her sideways. “You should buy a plane ticket.”

“You offered me the van in the first place. And besides, I’d like the drive. It won’t take so long, and it’ll give me time to get over my mom’s shit a little more before I have to be in the same house as her,” Clarke reasons optimistically.

Bellamy grunts a bit. “Fine. But I’m going with you.”

“You’re – what?” Clarke asks, alarmed and taken off guard. 

“The van is my baby. It was the first thing I bought with my first paychecks. You’re not taking it off to the other side of the country by yourself, I’m going with you.”

“Again, you offered me the van.”

“You didn’t ask about my conditions,” Bellamy argues, and doesn’t sound like he’s about to back down from this anytime soon. 

“Conditions,” Clarke repeats, and frowns, not because of the conditions, but because she finds herself not really in the spirit to get into it with Bellamy. It’s tiring, arguing with him all the time, and it won’t be such a bad thing having company on a week-long road trip, however it might go. She and Bellamy have gotten to the point that they don’t attempt to rub each other the wrong way every time they’re in the same approximate distance, and they might even be considered something like friends. At this realization, she slips a little further down onto the bed. 

“Yeah,” Bellamy says slowly, a little strangely. When she turns her head to look at him, she realizes his face is close enough to kiss and doesn’t make a move to pull away. He doesn’t, either, and that in itself tells her almost as much as the tiny furrow between his eyebrows. 

The tiny furrow tells her he’s thinking too hard about something. It tells him he’s conflicted, that he’s stopping himself from doing something he thinks he’ll regret in the morning. 

Clarke wonders if that’s true. 

“Bellamy,” she says, her voice a little too loud in the darkness. 

“Yeah?” he says again. 

“You should – you should kiss me now. You know, if you wanted to.”

The slowest smile spreads over his face, growing with the intensity in his eyes. Clarke thinks she likes these smiles of his the most, the half-secret ones, brought out into the light just for her. “Really, princess?”

She just barely manages to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “Yes, Bellamy. Really.”

He leans forward, still smiling, and when she slips her eyes close and he imprints the same smile along the curve of her lips, she has to return it. 

 

“I’ll be back,” Clarke sighs resignedly in the morning, with her bags in the bag and a week’s supply of road-trip food in the kitchen. She boosts herself up into the driver’s seat, with Octavia, Monty, and Jasper clutching mugs of steaming coffee and yawning around her. 

“Wait,” Octavia cautions worriedly, and scrubs a pajama sleeve over her eyes. 

Clarke turns back. “What is it?”

“You don’t –”

“You didn’t think you were going alone, did you?” Bellamy grins, bursting out the door of their apartment building and hurtling onto the sidewalk with two bulging bags slung over his shoulders. 

Clarke blinks, and wonders if her sleepless night spent tossing and turning around contemplating life and decisions and stupid boys with stupid vans has somehow manifested in hallucinations. 

Octavia looks slightly smug and very satisfied, stepping back to let her brother into the passenger’s-side seat, and sips at her coffee sedately.

“Um,” Clarke says eloquently. “It’s not noon yet. You’re not supposed to be awake, Bellamy.”

“I made an exception,” Bellamy shrugs and easily, and twists to toss his bags into the back. They land with ominous and not very confidence-inspiring thuds, but he only dusts his hands off and looks back at her, utterly calm. “I wasn’t going to let you off on a cross-country road trip alone, princess. Especially not in the family van.”

“We're a family now?” Clarke asks archly. 

Bellamy snorts. “Shut up and drive, princess.”

“So you’re saying you’re here to act as a bodyguard to the van, and nothing else?”

Bellamy meets her eyes, and a slow smile curves his mouth. “Yeah, okay, princess,” he says, waves at the rest of their family gathered on the sidewalk, and then slaps the dashboard. 

Clarke gets the message, and jerks her car door shut. Her smile matches Bellamy’s, a challenge in itself. “Okay,” she repeats, and starts the engine. 

 

They make a hit album. They go on a sold-out tour of the world. Clarke starts calling her mother on a sporadic basis, before it turns into something like a weekly event. It’s not much because they’re still barely civil to each other and sometimes the calls only last thirty seconds before one of them, usually Clarke, hangs up in rage, but it’s an improvement. She visits her father’s grave, whenever they’re in the area and sometimes when they aren’t, and eventually Bellamy starts coming with her as well. 

“So, you know, is this a thing now?” Jasper asks vaguely one day in the studio, as he digs into a pot of yogurt. He gestures between Clarke and Bellamy with his spoon, sticks it into his mouth, and looks up at the both of them expectantly. 

They glance sideways at each other. Clarke shrugs. “Sure,” Bellamy says doubtfully. “It can be a thing.”

“It either is or it isn’t,” Octavia argues, waltzing into the room in the world’s fluffiest black skirt. “Jasper, we’re not supposed to eat in here. It damages the integrity of the instruments, or something.”

“Being hungry is damaging my integrity,” Jasper protests mildly, and carries on eating. 

Octavia stares at him for a while before sighing and giving it up as a lost cause. She plops herself down in the corner, and straightens her shoulders. “So? What’ve you got to show me?”

“It’s just a guitar thing so far,” Bellamy tells her, reaching for his guitar leaning against the wall. He sits down on the ground as well, settling the guitar over his lap, and waits until Clarke joins him. “We haven’t started in on the drums of the bass or the whatever, yet.”

“Can I hear it?”

“Of course,” Clarke says, and nods at Bellamy so he plucks out the echoing beginning chords of their new song. 

Their voices work together as beautifully as always, complementing and playing off each other; but the single, melancholy guitar line takes that and shapes it up into something haunting and ethereal, and Clarke’s immensely glad that they’ve taken to keeping the recording on during all of these sessions, so that at least someone’s getting it on record. 

It’s light and it’s dark and it’s very, very grey, all blurred lines and no clarifications. There is no black and white, and somehow it’s a lament and a victory cry in the same line. It’s about their first time onstage together, when both of them had been so surprised at the immediate way they’d melded together so perfectly. The lyrics aren’t done yet, and Clarke reverts to humming the melody and slurring words together in a couple of sections, but the guitar takes over and pulls the music under before it resurfaces in Bellamy’s deeper baritone. 

It’s about firsts, because the band was never supposed to work out, they were supposed to be starving artists for life, but here they are anyway. It’s about firsts, because the first time Clarke met Bellamy all she wanted to do was rip out his throat, but here they are anyway. It’s about firsts, because Clarke’s father is dead but her mother’s still alive and somehow it’s unfair but something to be grateful for, at the same time.

And it’s always, always about the music and the family they’ve made for themselves, because when Clarke thinks about it, she still wouldn’t give it this up for anything else in the world. 

 

fin. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> come find me at c-majorchords.tumblr.com for, like, things.


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